Ferreira da Silva poses the non-linearity of time and the non-sequentiality of events in Octavia Butler's neo-slave novel Kindred as a way of questioning the epistemological and ontological foundations of modern political philosophy. She challenges the premise that the colonial is associated with the past—as pre-capitalist accumulation in historical materialism—or with moral failings. Just as post-industrial landscapes still rely on industrial production (Moore, 2015), colonialism remains essential to futurist narratives, as Olga Nedvyga’s paper shows. The future perfect allows Ferreira da Silva to highlight the part of slave labour and indigenous lands in the figuration of global capital. Meanwhile, Caribbean literatures have long foregrounded such non-linear and non-sequential stories and histories of dispossession and resilience (Benítez-Rojo, 1998; De Matas, 2024, 2022; van der Marel, 2017).
Although we focus on the figurative and narrative power of the literary, our approach is consistently transmedial (Negrón-Muntaner, 2019). Ferreira da Silva exploits the (false) promise of transparency in the primal scene, hence the return to the colonial, which presupposes a clear separation between ethico-juridical (liberty of contract) and capitalist values. This panel nuances her argument by examining literary scenes that are no less opaque for being set in the past, as Victoria Zurita discusses. Compared to speculative philosophy, literary studies are concerned with less exemplary scenes of value that nevertheless contain compelling subtleties. Violeta Lorenzo’s analysis of a Puerto Rican text, for instance, unpacks the role of the State in the accumulation of value and dispossession, which resonates with two other papers.
All three panelists engage with the dialectic of “unpayable debt,” which frames the past through the workings of a self-defeating lineage. De la Parra’s protagonist is indebted to an ancestor responsible for her existence, her elite education and, indirectly, her feminist views, but is left with an accumulated negative inheritance (patriarchal oppression) and therefore a diminished capacity to pay a debt that is not “hers.” When symbolic debt has been cast in fiction, as in Faust or Melmoth, it is often through the mediation of a contract. Ferreira notes of Butler's protagonist, Dana, who is constantly summoned to the past: “There was no contract.” Zurita and Nedvyga interrogate this kind of disjunction when it comes to raciality: which disempowered women characters have access to a contract, however illusory, and which do not. Raciality is also central to the colonial legacies Lorenzo addresses, as well as the mid-century development projects in Puerto Rico that played into the national debt.
Lorenzo explores scenes of dispossession in Francisco Font Acevedo’s La troupe Samsonite (2016) and examines how the novel illustrates the economic exploitation of Puerto Rico. The characters’ circus-like tricks highlight the imbalances of value between colonial legacies and contemporary socio-economic structures. The paper considers how the reconfiguration of the house—a recurring metaphor in Puerto Rican literature—suggests alternative ways of navigating and resisting value structures rooted in colonialism, reclaiming value on their own terms.
Nedvyga analyzes how Rita Indiana’s Asmodeo (2024) and Leticia Tonos’s Aire: Just Breathe (2024) bring the dialectic between ethical values and economic worth to bear on the gendered scene of care. By repurposing colonial indexes of dispossession (from Taíno stone masks and slave shackles to colonial monuments) and projecting them within a sci-fi framework, she argues, these works expose the precariousness of informal healing institutions, while exploring the moral sense-making of the world that accompanies care.
Zurita examines several scenes of value in de la Parra’s Ifigenia (1924), which center interracial intimacy by depicting the protagonist’s relationship with her Black servant friends. Zurita argues that this value dynamic is key to understanding her “moderate feminism,” linking cultivation—through taste, literature, and cosmetics—to the commodification of the female body. These scenes mobilize racial stereotypes by framing Black womanhood as a site of feminist utopianism and interracial friendship as a tool for white women’s self-discovery.
Each presentation will last 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of structured comments by Luis Rosa to stimulate discussion. The session will conclude with a 15-minute open discussion. All three panelists identify as diasporic scholars (Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Ukraine) at different stages of their careers, teaching in Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature.